Moho Forum

It is for an event

That works well. You've done a nice piece of work there and there's quite a lot going on. Colourful and appealing

It looks great! What all that happens in there, how long did this take to put together?

Thanks for the nice feedback.
Danimal, it took about a month to do, sometimes working for full days, other times squeezing it in with my other work. I was asked to design a poster for this event which meant getting permission from the illustrator, then scanning the book art and cutting out objects in photoshop so I could move them around. (Book spreads are usually wide and posters typically portrait format so lots of compositing required). I ended up with all these little kids and animals on layers and decided to make a trailer. It was lovely working with the art of Lori Joy Smith http://lorijoysmith.com. Really stylish and adorable work.
I learned how crazy it was to be moving around the layers across a wide, wide background in one continuous animation after running into a lot of trouble in my AS project. But by the time I got all the great advice on the forum I had done a ton of work and was committed to my storyboard idea, so proceeded with the mess. One character layer became so wacky I had to import a new version of her at 3 different points in the animation, and make her predecessors invisible as I did.
AS doesn't seem to allow a line of text with different coloured letters, so each letter in the animation is an image imported from PS. I wasn't able to figure out how to do a follow path with all of them at once, so was moving and turning them one by one (eek!)
I did a lot of AS stuff for the first time in this video: creating actions, cycling, following Victor Paredes demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYCNY2242IQ almost exactly to make the robin's flight cycle, and a lot more. Then last night, I did a crash course in adding music, transitions and the final still in premier pro after reading Hayasidist's post on how useful that software is. (I have the adobe cloud subscription so have access to everything!) I'd only used iMovie before but found it very limiting and the output of iffy quality. Adobe TV has terrific tutorials and I was able to get the info I need, all except for how to export. I got that mostly here: http://guides.lib.umich.edu/content.php ... id=2779539, but still had to do some guesswork.
Here's a tip - tutorials produced by university departments or elementary school teachers are often terrific. It doesn't matter if it's done by the department of forestry or microbiology for some obscure course. The info is usually very clear and straightforward because they are trying to provide a foolproof guide for their students.

Interesting - thanks for the insight!

Just a thought if you haven't tried this already

You actually can have text with different colors relatively easily in AS. You might want to experiment with typing text into a layer using the one color you choose, then zoom into that text and you will see that each letter is indeed its own "shape" with points. You can then pick a new color for whatever letter you want and use the paint bucket tool to fill the "shape" letter with that color.

One nice thing about short trailers - you can watch them several times easily. This one was worth the trouble - I stopped it in a couple of places and moved the cursor button back and forth. I especially liked how the kid went from the swing to the slide sandwiched in between different layers of those objects. I didn't read the comments until after watching - nothing in the video shows that you were having any problems with the software.

I loved it. Great work.

Thanks very much!

Very nicely done. Good work!

This is charming!